


The Wolf and the Cat

by Elysium-fic (RCD_Anon)



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: BDSM, Double Penetration, Kink Meme, Multi, Prostitution, double anal, double vaginal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-02
Updated: 2010-11-02
Packaged: 2017-10-13 00:49:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/130968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RCD_Anon/pseuds/Elysium-fic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a kink-meme prompt <a href="http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/1636.html?thread=2113636#t2113636">here</a>:</p><p><i>I know <span class="u">someone</span> wants a scruffy Warden sandwich. It can't be just me. I don't care who the f!Warden is, or when it occurs in the timeline. I just want everyone to have a grand old time. Oral, anal, DP, bondage, roleplay, whatever. Bonus points if dwarven ale is involved <strike>and they wake up in just their smallclothes with tattoos on their foreheads, bound for Rivain.</strike></i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wolf and the Cat

"Duncan is dead, Marguerite," Riordan said softly, his grey eyes filled with grief.

" _Oui,_ I had assumed as much."

"They're all dead. Those imbeciles at the border said Ostagar was a slaughter before they turned us away. _All_ the Grey Wardens of Ferelden are dead, _ma bichette_. Does that mean nothing to you?"

"And what should it mean to me?" Marguerite asked with a shrug. "I am grieved for the loss of Duncan, it is true. As for the rest, I did not know them. To me their deaths mean only that it is now more likely that others with whom I am far more familiar shall die."

"Ah, you are a cold woman, Marguerite," Riordan sighed. "I shall never understand you."

She reached under his leather war skirt and cupped him with a hand that was rapidly warming far beyond body temperature. "Some parts of you do not find me so cold, _mon chat_ ," she whispered with a satisfied smile.

"I must leave at nightfall," he said, groaning softly as he ground against the heat of her hand. "Duncan's last letter said he had some promising recruits. An unsworn templar, and possibly a young woman from Highever. I will sneak across the border, try to reach our compound in Denerim and see if any the Grey Wardens still live."

Marguerite nodded. "Then it is best we do not waste time, yes?" she suggested, sinking to her knees before him.

Neither of them felt the need to point out that it would be the last time she would ever see him.

* * *

Marguerite had come to the Grey Wardens damaged. Damaged from years spent terrorized by the fat, sweaty merchant who employed her mother as his kitchen elf so that he would have access to her tiny, white-blond daughter, whose shrieks of pain he was convinced stood as a testament to his manhood. Damaged from the terror she'd known when the templars had dragged her to the Circle of Magi when, at the age of eight, she accidentally killed the merchant with a bolt of lightning to stop him from hurting her yet again. Damaged from the bigotry of the human apprentices in the Tower, who did not seem to care that they themselves were ridiculed and oppressed, so long as they could pass the derision they received along to the elven mages they trained with. Damaged by the cruelty of the templars who presented a pious faces before their Knight-Commander but secretly disdained their vows and treated any apprentice unlucky enough to be discovered alone as fair game. Damaged from years spent selling herself on the docks to every filthy sailor with a copper coin or a crust of bread after she found a way to destroy her phylactery and free herself from the templars' yoke.

One day a Grey Warden with long, dark hair had come to the docks, filled with a sorrow and rage she didn't care to question. She did not know why he had chosen her, only that once she had taken him back to her dingy room in a waterfront hovel, he became cruel, and something awoke within her, something she thought had been killed long before she ever became a woman.

Passion.

He did not merely rut above her until he was spent, adding his seed to the leavings of dozens of others crusted on the filthy linens upon her cot. He had hurt her—which sometimes her patrons did, though few with such skill—with teeth and fingernails and hard, bruising hands. He had also unrelentingly sought her pleasure—which _none_ of her patrons did—even when she told him that he would have to pay extra if he wasted such time. She had reveled in it, feeling alive for the first time since that day in childhood when her innocence had been shattered by the fat merchant.

Somewhere in that moment, as his violence escalated, she began to feel threatened. Forgetting that she had no great objection to dying, she had unthinkingly defended herself with her long-unused magic. The Grey Warden had known her immediately for what she was, but he did not turn her in to the templars as she might have expected. Instead, he had taken her back with him to the Grey Warden compound in Val Royeaux.

The Grey Wardens, she thought, would offer a chance for a more meaningful death than if she died of a pox or at the hands of a drunken sailor bent on brutality or by the templars if they ever caught up with her again. Marguerite had welcomed that. And if others of the order were also possessed of the sharp-edged desires Riordan had demonstrated that day on the docks when he recruited her, so much the better.

But she was to be disappointed.

She did not die with her Joining, nor was death in battle against the darkspawn immediately forthcoming. Instead, she learned, it was to be thirty years doing little of actual importance before she sought the Deep Roads and the end of her own life. And Riordan did not seek her company again; whatever demon he had been exorcising that day at the docks, it seemed to trouble him no more. There were rumors—not that she often troubled herself to listen to the idle gossip of the other Wardens—about a woman he had loved and the babe she had borne him, whom he had driven away so that she would not have to watch him succumb to the taint. Whatever his reasons for his behavior that day, after her Joining he barely deigned to acknowledge Marguerite's presence, much less visit her bed.

She did not fit in among the other Grey Wardens any more than she had the other mages. Few of them, even the humans, seemed to share the common disdain for mages and elves, and yet she was odd to them. Too cold, too impersonal, too pragmatic. She was not interested in forming friendships or being part of a fraternity; she merely wanted a death that would be more purposeful than her life had been. What few Grey Wardens managed to overcome their uneasiness about her personality enough to bed her quickly found themselves in over their heads when they discovered her keen taste for cruelty, and so she had not been in the order long before she found herself sleeping alone, except on the rare occasions she sought out a whore to meet her needs, however clumsily.

She had been a Grey Warden for nearly six years when the archdemon awoke, discovered by the darkspawn as they tunneled through the earth seeking for it, century after century. They all felt it happen, every single Grey Warden in Thedas. Whether asleep or awake, they all felt that sudden roar and the song within their minds.

A Blight was coming.

Only Marguerite met this news with anything other than dread.

It would be another three years until the darkspawn horde would emerge from underground and reveal its location. In those years, the Grey Wardens sent many expeditions into the Deep Roads to try to garner some idea of where the Blight would first appear, but to little avail. The archdemon fed, grew stronger, gathered the darkspawn to it and sent bands into the world to corrupt and retrieve humans, elves, dwarves and qunari. They brought back females and soon their numbers swelled as the broodmothers began to produce more of their kind.

In those years, the Grey Wardens suddenly came to life. Message traffic bustled in and out of the Val Royeaux compound, to Ferelden, Antiva, the Anderfels. Recruitment efforts redoubled in all parts of Thedas. The Warden-Commander for each nation was summoned to a conference, and since the Grey Warden "sense" of the archdemon placed it somewhere in southern Thedas, they convened not at Weisshaupt, but in Val Royeaux,

It was there she met Duncan.

He and Riordan greeted each other like long-lost brothers, smiling and embracing, clapping each other on the back. Seeing them together, it was perhaps the first time Marguerite felt regret that she had never really formed any friendships with her fellow Grey Wardens.

She wondered about this Duncan. What sort of man was it who could get such an animated reaction from the mild-mannered Riordan with his hidden streak of fine-edged cruelty. Duncan, she thought, looked like he had edges as well, for all that he was unfailingly proper and polite. His edges would not be those of the finely-honed dagger, but of the claymore.

Not a cat like Riordan, all subtlety and hidden claws, but a wolf, bold with savage, tearing fangs.

The thought made desire stir within her where there normally existed only emptiness. And that desire was heightened by the fact that while Riordan studiously pretended she didn't exist, Duncan was attentive and charming, his dark eyes warming when he saw her. A hint of a promising smile made his lips twitch beneath his beard when he realized she was a mage.

She resolved then that she would have him before he returned to Ferelden.

Thus did she find herself descending to the great hall that served as the dining and common room of the keep one evening. Many of the other Wardens grew quiet when she entered, for usually she retired after supper and had never made an attempt to join them as they drank their wine and played cards or dice or other games of chance. Still, Duncan rose and greeted her with a smile when she entered, and bade her sit with him and Riordan. She gladly accepted.

"Duncan managed to bring us a cask of dwarven ale when he stopped at Orzammar on his way to Orlais," Riordan remarked as she deliberately insinuated herself into the too-small space on the bench between them. At the trestle tables around them, conversations resumed and her presence was accepted and forgotten.

"Dwarven ale?" She looked in askance at Duncan. "I have not tried it."

The Fereldan Warden offered her his tankard and chuckled when she wrinkled her nose at the smell.

"This is something we're meant to drink, yes?" she asked skeptically.

"Only if you want to get drunk," he answered.

"It smells like old laundry water."

"I assure you, it tastes no better," Riordan said dryly, his voice muffled by his own tankard. "But it does the job."

"Ah well," she sighed, lifting the tankard. "It can hardly be worse than some of the men I have had in my mouth."

Duncan and Riordan both laughed when she promptly spat out the mouthful of ale. "Sacred bride of the Maker!" she swore, gasping and coughing. "This is a joke, yes? A prank upon me?"

"Forgive me, Marguerite," Duncan said gallantly, taking the tankard from her. "I would never play so cruel a trick. It's an acquired taste. Here, let me get you some wine to cleanse your palate."

Shuddering with revulsion, she took a long draught of the wine he poured into a goblet from a flagon on the trestle table before him. "Leave it to the dwarves to concoct such an odious brew," she finally said. "Surely they do it just to be disagreeable, no?"

"That seems as good an explanation as any." Duncan lips twitched again. "Marguerite... I am curious. How did you come by your name?"

"Ah, you mean how did I come by a _human_ name?"

"I mean no offense. In Ferelden I don't often encounter elves with human names, but I've met several from Orlais."

"I am not offended," the mage shrugged. "My mother, she was a foolish woman, yes, like many Orlesian elves who start to think themselves part of part of their employer's family. She thought if she gave her child a human name, the—ah, what is the word the Dalish use?—the _shemlen_ might not see that I was an elf."

"It's a lovely name, even if it is nearly as long as the woman who bears it," Duncan said, and Marguerite smiled at the compliment. Few of the men she'd serviced when working the docks had ever bothered with flattery.

Riordan snorted, irritated with their flirting.

The evening aged, the wine and ale flowed. Tongues loosened and hands became freer. Wardens began trickling out of the hall alone or in pairs and eventually only the three of them remained. She liked this Duncan, with his coarse Fereldan accent and his dark Rivaini complexion. He did not treat her as an oddity or a whore, did not seem to notice nor care that she was prickly and unlikeable. It was very simple; he wished to have her and then he would leave, back to his filthy, backwards country whose sailors had always reeked and seemed so very ignorant when she had bedded them.

She had no objections to that plan, and he had no objections when her hand stroked him through his breeches under the table.

"Tell me, _mon loup_ , are you a sweet, gentle cub, or do you bite?" she murmured, leaning close and closing her teeth upon his earlobe.

"I can go either way, if the occasion calls for it," he answered, setting his tankard aside and turning his head so that his face was all but touching hers. The dwarven ale didn't smell nearly so objectionable on his breath as she licked the outline of his lips. "Which would you prefer?"

"I wish to feel your teeth," she sighed. " _Mon chat_ , Riordan, once he had claws, but now I think he has lost them."

"And why would you think that?" Riordan asked coldly, setting his empty tankard down upon the table.

"It has been, what, nearly nine years since you found me on the docks, and still you disdain me," she said, flipping from desire to annoyance in a heartbeat. "At first I think that of all men, you are special, yes? That you understand that it is only pain which makes the living worthwhile until death comes to release you. You, of all the Grey Wardens in Val Royeaux, know how to bring me pleasure, but do you come to me in all this time? _Non_! And so I think that man I met on the docks, that fierce Warden whose hands wielded such beautiful pain, he is gone. Pah! Replaced by an impotent fool who knows nothing of passion."

She thought she might have flown at him in a rage, and that too, was thrilling. To feel anger for the first time in—had she ever felt it, she wondered? It was a glorious, vital feeling, her heart pounding in her breast, her blood singing through her veins and roaring in her ears.

"Marguerite, go easy upon him," she heard Duncan say soothingly, as he pushed the bench back from the tab to make enough room to draw her onto his lap as though she were no more than a child. "You do not know Riordan so well as you think."

"No, Duncan," Riordan said quickly. "My sorrows are not for her to know."

"You think I care about your sorrows?" Marguerite sneered. "You know nothing of sorrows! They are useless! They make us feel dead while we still draw breath. It is pain and rage and passion which make us feel alive, but if you will not give me this then I have no time to waste for you."

Swift as the cat she had compared him to, he had her by the throat, dragging her off Duncan's lap and pinning her against the table. Empty tankards clattered to the floor and her half-filled chalice of wine spilled, spreading about her like a pool of blood before dripping down between the slats of the table. Marguerite glared up at him, her chest heaving for a breath that she could not draw. She did not try to summon her magic, for she knew he would not kill her. He would never waste such a valuable resource. Still, the spots began to grow in her eyes, and it was not until she was on the brink of unconsciousness that he released her.

She lay upon the table, gasping and wheezing desperately for air through her bruised throat as Duncan held Riordan's arm and spoke to him softly.

"She does not know about Ziela, my friend," he said, attempting to placate the enraged Riordan. "She would not speak so otherwise. It is the call of the archdemon. We are all on edge, all aware of our impending deaths. I feel it, too."

"If she wants rage, I will show her rage."

"Yes, do!" Marguerite croaked. "Bah, men! You are all so predictable! This... Ziela, was she small and fair, an elf like me? Did she simper and coo and vow her love until you shattered her heart? And hating yourself, did you seek me out and punish me for your own sins, and then try to atone by bringing me here and making me a Grey Warden? I was right, you are a fool!"

He was upon her before she had finished hurling her insults, his tongue thrusting into her mouth while he hands grabbed great fistfuls of her hair and pulled painfully. This was better, this was what she wanted. He pulled her head back until she thought her neck might break and began biting along the line of her throat painfully.

"Oh, _oui, mon chat_ ," she moaned when his teeth closed over the tendon between her neck and shoulder and began to cut into her skin.

Riordan pulled away enough to open the toggles closing her robe and then he split the shift she wore beneath open with almost casual ease. But there was nothing easy about his teeth as they found her breasts and began creating throbbing red rings of pain in her soft, white flesh, some of which seeped blood.

She lay upon that trestle table like a roast of hind upon a platter, and Riordan was the ill-manned brute set to tear her apart with his hands rather than the carving knife. She could feel her sex clenching, flooding with arousal. It had been so long since she had taken a lover she knew she would be exquisitely tight and that, too, she relished. He would hurt when he took her, and she was eager for it.

Another pair of hands joined Riordan's upon her body, lower. Duncan peeled away her smallclothes, exposing her dripping wet sex to the cool air of the common hall. Only then did it dawn upon her that anyone in the compound could stumble upon them and see her being gloriously brutalized upon that table.

She smiled and urged them on in vulgar language.

When Duncan's teeth clamped on her inner thigh, Marguerite bucked and screamed, one of her hands scrambling for his hair in its queue, seeking to pull him closer and grind her hairless sex against the roughness of his beard. Riordan's teeth found her nipple and bit down just as Duncan thrust three fingers roughly into her sex and she came with a scream that echoed in the rafters.

"Be silent!" Riordan growled. "Do you want to bring the whole compound down upon us?"

"If you wish my silence, _mon chat_ ," she taunted, "then perhaps you'd best find some better occupation for my mouth, no?"

And so it was that she found herself dragged to the edge of the table, where her head hung upside-down into space while the rest of her body lay open and at the mercy of Duncan's hands and mouth. Riordan quickly divested himself of his doublet and breeches—here, safe among other Grey Wardens in the compound, they did not wear armor—and placing one hand under her head to support her, thrust into her mouth.

At this angle, it was easy for him to pass into her throat; there was nothing she could do to prevent it, in fact, for all that she gagged and scratched and pushed at him. His other hand seized her breasts and squeezed roughly, bruising her soft white flesh. Meanwhile, Duncan's hands and teeth continued to score her thighs. Each time she writhed and tried to move away, he dragged her back, biting harder, shoving his fingers into her sex more ruthlessly. The only thing that kept her from coming again was Riordan's cock in her mouth, choking her, thrusting into her bruised throat as the pleasure Duncan's fingers wrought mounted ever higher within her.

She could feel Riordan's body quaking, inching ever closer to his release as he fucked her throat. Her hands found the forearm of the hand he had grasping her breast and though she could not speak enough to chant a spell, she managed to send enough power into his body to force him over the edge with a sharp shock, despite his efforts to hold back. He cursed her as thick, salty fluid surged over her tongue and down her throat. An instant later, Duncan's tongue parted her folds and found her pearl and had it not been for Riordan's cock still in her mouth, her shriek would have awoken the entire keep.

Somehow, Riordan ended up on the table behind her, forcing her to sit up and watch Duncan as he devoured her, his fingers pushing into both her openings while his mouth nibbled and sucked and licked until Marguerite flailed and bucked, restrained only by Riordan's iron-threwed arms about her ribs. When she looked down at her body, she was astonished by the array of bite marks and bruises that had quickly blossomed on her pale skin. Each individual ache and pain made her feel spectacularly alive. And Riordan was making certain it was not merely the front of her that was marked. He bit her shoulders and neck, adding that delicious edge of suffering to the pleasure Duncan brought. His fingers mercilessly pinched and pulled at her nipples, and his voice in her ear promised greater agony to come.

At his command, she summoned the cool energy of rejuvenation to her hand and as it washed over him, his cock swelled against her back, hard and eager. Duncan pulled away, his beard beaded with saliva and other fluids he had pulled from her, and he sat upon the edge of the table and pulled her into his lap, kissing her deeply. He reeked of her musk, tasted of her so strongly she groaned and eagerly licked at his chin for more. She didn't know how or when his breeches had been opened—perhaps he'd been stroking himself as he plied her with his mouth—but it didn't matter. She straddled his lap and forced herself down upon him, thrilled at the ache of stretching around him.

Duncan's need was scarcely less urgent than Riordan's. Perhaps there had been more truth than she realized to his words about anxiety over the archdemon driving them. When Marguerite begged him for more, he gladly gave it, lying back upon the table for an angle that allowed him to drive deeper into her as he lifted and lowered her upon his cock, adding the bruising force of his hands upon her waist to her own thrusts.

It hurt to take him so deeply, hurt to feel him ram against the gate to her womb. It was marvelous. When she began to wail, Riordan stuffed her own damp smallclothes into her mouth and clamped his hand over them so that she could not spit them out.

She heard the scrape of the bench against the stone floor as Riordan impatiently kicked it out of his way. He pushed her down onto Duncan's chest and leaned over her, pinning her between them.

"Shall we split her in two if we both occupy her, do you think?" he asked, as though the answer mattered.

Marguerite hummed her agreement with the plan, wriggling enthusiastically against Duncan, eager to feel Riordan's cock wedging itself into her _derrière_. Instead, however, he began to force his way into her sheath alongside Duncan.

Had she been less wet, less ready, less willing to accommodate suffering, she might have indeed thought she was being split in two. Taking Duncan, human and generously appointed as he was, had been a challenge. To stretch around them both had her moaning into her makeshift gag, lying limp and trembling and sweating upon Duncan's chest. They would break her, she thought deliriously even as the burning began to fade somewhat as she adjusted and more moisture flooded from her sheath to ease their passage. Surely they would break her, if they began to move like this.

The thought filled her with mad joy and if her mouth had not been gagged, she would have begun laughing hysterically.

But move they did, awkwardly at first as they rubbed against one another as well as the walls of her sheath, and then finding a rhythm that allowed both to slide in an out. Their thrusts were shallow, as neither one had an optimum angle for deep penetration, but filled as she was it didn't matter. All that mattered was the pleasure, the stretching, the pain of Riordan's teeth upon her back and Duncan's hands, growing ever crueler at her breasts. In that commingling of ecstasy and suffering lay the spark that made living worth it.

When Duncan's hand sought her pearl, she came, the spasms nearly lost in the intensity of being so full, so sore. Almost immediately afterward Riordan sat upon his hand and rudely worked a finger into her rear passage, and then another in quick succession. Another uncomfortable intrusion to adapt to, made even tighter by virtue of the fact that she was already filled nigh to bursting, and yet he was merciless, working his fingers in and out.

Riordan spat again as he withdrew from her sheath and began to work his way into the opening he had loosened. That was fullness and pain of a different sort, for his preparations had been intended for his own ease and not to spare her suffering. It burned at first, a pain she had not felt in far too long. But pain soon became a pale and insufficient word to describe the feeling of them both moving powerfully within her. Riordan would press her forward to deepen his own strokes at times, and then Duncan would shove her upright to thrust more fully at others, and so she was passed back and forth between one hard chest and the other.

Lost in sensation, overwhelmed, overcome, she struggled against them even as she yearned for more. They were all sweating, all trembling, all filled with savage, desperate need. Duncan and Riordan, seeking to feel alive because they knew death was so very near, and Marguerite seeking to taste the edge of death because it was better than the nothingness of living. They punished each other for the fates none of them could control.

Marguerite's fingernails scored Duncan's chest until he grabbed her hands and would not release them. She thrashed and struggled until Riordan wrapped his arms about her, pinning her arms to her sides and forcing her down onto Duncan until she was trapped between them, overwhelmed by their size. Tears she did not know she had shed mingled with the perspiration on Duncan's chest as his skillful fingers once more brought her to the pinnacle.

"She trembles like a doe scenting the hunter," Riordan remarked as she quaked between them, pulling the gag from her mouth. "Is this enough for you, _ma bichette_ , or do you still seek more?"

" _Oui,_ " she sobbed into Duncan's chest. "More."

"Marguerite, we do not wish to injure you," Duncan said, coming back to himself somewhat and stroking her hair back from her face as she stared at him with wild, desperate eyes.

"I am a mage. I will heal," she gasped as Riordan slammed hard into her backside. "Please, I beg you, more."

It was Duncan who told Riordan to withdraw, he who turned her around above him and insisted she call grease to her hand to slick his member before he took possession of her rear passage, he who pulled her down with implacable insistence upon him and filled her more than even Riordan had done.

"Caress Riordan," Duncan rasped from behind and beneath her. "Prepare him."

Marguerite's eyes widened as she began to understand what it was Duncan intended. Surely not! Surely they would destroy her if they both....

...and yet her hand went out to Riordan anyway, coating his shaft with warm grease as he thrust eagerly into the ring of her fingers and palm. Duncan lifted her up and down easily, sliding her along his member until her rear passage accepted him with no difficulty. Riordan seized her by two handfuls of hair and kissed her hard, biting at her lips before laving the ache away with his tongue. And then she was being drawn down to lie back upon Duncan's chest and Riordan once again lay over her, this time intimately above her. He began to push inside, not in front but in the rear where Duncan also possessed her.

He clapped a hand over her mouth when she would have screamed, for this was something not even the brutes on the docks had ever done to her. She thought there couldn't possibly be any way he could fit within that passage, but eventually it began to yield to him as Duncan lay very still beneath and within her. She was burning, certain that at any moment she would be torn asunder, and still her body made room for him, one torturous second after another. When the angle proved difficult to manage, he pushed one of her knees up and continued onward.

Somehow, he filled her. She did not know how, could not imagine there was a way to accomplish it. Her body protested the abuse even as her soul welcomed it. She sobbed against Riordan's palm, lost to everything except sensation. There was pain, yes, but also immense pleasure; the pleasure of being filled, stretched, possessed.

Duncan was unable to move more than a minute bit at this angle without losing his place within her, and so it was Riordan who guided them, Riordan who thrust to fill her over and over, Riordan whose cock brought on Duncan's pleasure by rubbing against him in the tightness of her body. Duncan's hands closed upon her as he shuddered and groaned, and soon thereafter Riordan's motions grew even easier, as Duncan shrank and softened. He plowed into her without mercy, taking out upon her his own grief and rage and despair, and she took it all into her, embraced it and felt it mate with her own tumultuous emotions.

His fingers brought her to the pinnacle again before he plunged over himself, adding his seed to Duncan's as it coated her passage and seeped out of her and onto the hair covering Duncan's groin. And then she was trapped between them once more, caught between Duncan's sturdy and stable presence beneath her and Riordan's unsteady trembling above her.

To her surprise, when he withdrew, Riordan kissed her softly, sweetly, and thanked her. He murmured apologies and endearments and she found her arms going around him and holding him tightly as Duncan's hands stoked her bruised and teeth-marked shoulders.

She found herself too sore and weak to take the stairs alone, without even sufficient energy or clarity of thought to summon a healing or rejuvenation spell. Of them, Duncan was the least affected and it was he who bore her upstairs, taking her not to her own chamber but to Riordan's. She hadn't the energy to protest. Instead, she lay between them and fell quickly asleep.

Marguerite awoke when she felt Duncan stir the next morning, aching wonderfully in every muscle in her body. He was hard against her hip and without thinking she turned to him and welcomed his weight as he shifted above her. After such abuse the night before he did not need to be rough to cause her pain, and she welcomed it, smiling as rapture took him. When he collapsed above her, she turned her head to see Riordan was awake and watching them.

Duncan was to depart that morning, however, and so she kissed him before he rose from the bed to dress and bade him farewell, before turning her attention to Riordan.

Duncan never returned to them again.

* * *

She and Riordan never became lovers in the usual sense. Ever so often they passed a night or two together, when it became too much to dwell in the vague and uncertain space between life and death that seemed exclusively reserved for Grey Wardens. Those nights became more frequent as the archdemon's screams shattered their sleep, slowly driving them desperately mad. They tore at each other violently only for Marguerite to heal their wounds in the morning, and then they resumed their long watch for the reckoning they knew awaited them.

After the Fereldans refused them entry, they said their farewells to one another in the way they knew best there in snowy passes of the Frostback Mountains between Ferelden and Orlais, with teeth and nails, bruises and bites. And then Riodan slipped into Ferelden alone and Marguerite returned to a life in Val Royeaux that was now somehow even more vacant.

It was over a year later that she was sent instructions from Weisshaupt to report to the new Grey Warden stronghold in Amaranthine and take over as its commander.

Knowing how Ferelden had claimed the lives of the only two people in all of Thedas she valued, she went eagerly.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Dragon Age: Origins and associated content belong to EA and Bioware. I am making no money from their use.**


End file.
